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#2 Lovely! A French academic twist to community organizing, they've had it so right for so long. Will carpaccio soon be added to BBQ'd wings as an allowable EBT expenditure? Will Duflo also suggest the top 2 percent be required to pay a bit more in taxes.....say 75% ?

#6 Esther Duflo (born October 25, 1972) is a French economist, Co-Founder and Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Duflo is an NBER Research Associate, serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD),and is Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research's development economics program.

Her research focuses on microeconomic issues in developing countries, including household behavior, education, access to finance, health, and policy evaluation. Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Dean Karlan, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, she has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics.

NRO - I think that this is another straw in the wind signaling the transformation of the quantitative social sciences into somewhat more experimental disciplines.

The Atlantic - Much of the work that we now think of as economics, political science and other social sciences will likely be displaced by some hybrid of biology, experimental economics, psychology and other fields that can evaluate hypotheses for the quantified prediction of human behavior through structured falsification tests... Even in its current embryonic form, experimental economics already suffers from excessive rhetorical generalization from what some specific group of college sophomores did with $30 to fairly grand statements about human nature... This new approach will dominate what we now think of as classical economics. This will likely not address a lot of territory now covered in economics, including, for example, many of the issues related to the stimulus debates. These kinds of topics will of course remain interesting, and work will still be done on them in an academic setting; it will simply be even more obviously non-science, and be done down the hall in the history, philosophy and literature departments.